Hat tip to CTRL+W33D.

It’s the dilemma nigh-every attractive, cash-strapped city boy faces in a tough economic climate: is it wrong to sell it on-the-side to get by?
Every megalopolis has its resident Red Light Land, the bounds of which are not limited to a compartmentalized Times Square, The Castro, or Santa Monica Boulevard. There are uptown and downtown hookers, some gypsies, some tramps, some thieves; some you can spot on a dime, others you’d never guess were on the stroll.
Every time I have a Fanny Hill moment — you know what I mean if you’ve ever experienced someone offering you money for something sex-related — I always wonder just what clicks in someone’s mind that gets them to cross that line. I can’t say I have any big moral outrage against prostitution, but empirically I have cautions about how healthy it is, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
I never feel like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour when it happens. I get something more akin to the sensibility espoused by Strangers With Candy’s Jerri Blank (“When you walk ’til you limp, and you give a cut to a pimp — you’re a street whore.”), and that’s not the sexiest mindset ever. Sex work in all its various incarnations is just something that not everyone can sign on for. Just the term “sex worker” gives me the ick because it sounds like the nadir of voodoo capitalism wherein everyone has to be “productive” and even a basic biological act has got to turn a profit. (read the full article)









